What I Have Lost at Sea

SWWIM Every Day
by Kerrin McCadden

by Kerrin McCadden

            What have I lost at sea

                        is a question you insist has an answer,

                                    the gap between flotsam

 

            and jetsam begging the question

                        about discarding versus truly losing,

                                    and while you explain that flotsam floats

 

            up from inside and jetsam is

                        introduced into the water,

                                    I think instead about generosity,

 

            about walking into the bathroom

                        at work and the paper towel dispenser

                                    has already begun its offering,

 

            triggered in the dark

                        to roll out its dry tongue

                                    before I open the door and switch

 

            on the light, how one place

                        where the dark is holy and offerings

                                    are made is not the sea, where generosity

 

            is not a thing but beauty is:

                        the octopus walking on two legs

                                    is beautiful, jet-packing away

 

            or shrinking into a shadow it makes

                        of itself, countless waving arms

                                    of anemones, the seahorse

 

            that never seems to tip, 

                        the tiny fans in all the gills,

                                    the moray eels in caves, even the shark.

 

            I think finding anything in the sea

                        would be impossible. I am not at sea.

                                    I have lost everything here.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Kerrin McCadden’s Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes won the Vermont Book Award and the New Issues Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation Writing Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. She lives in South Burlingon, Vermont.

Ode to Iron

SWWIM Every Day
Elisabeth Adwin Edwards

by Elisabeth Adwin Edwards

Call me Stellar Demise, my hemoglobin pulses with the last exhalations

of stars. I have cast myself

into a cup, a scaffold, a fence, a pipe, a cup. That which is foundational,

marks the edge of a loving space, or fills

to overflowing, that which can be used as weapon, but more often

the thing that spills

over. Well-seasoned skillet, molasses, rust. Some days I’m so hard, heavy. Others,

so magnetic I can't move. I have carried water

no one would want to drink, water not fit for a child to bathe in. Cells of the fetus

I aborted at age twenty-one

bored through the blood-brain barrier and his tiny double-helixes corkscrewed

my mind. He still courses

through me. I imagine his eyes the color of black ore, like his father's. Sometimes

I dream him into a strong body, a body

outside of myself, a body I can touch, and I become a spigot, all I do is weep.

Another star died and found its way here.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

After a successful 20-year career as a regional theater actor, Elisabeth Adwin Edwards has shifted her focus to poetry; her work has appeared in Rogue Agent, ASKEW, Serving House, Melancholy Hyperbole, Menacing Hedge, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other publications. Her chapbook, The Way I Learn To Take It Like A Girl, won the 2018 These Fragile Lilacs Chapbook Contest (judged by William Fargason). She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

Yellow List

SWWIM Every Day
by Callista Buchen

by Callista Buchen

here, in the sunshine, a lemon

picked from a neighbor’s tree

like the moon later on, in the right

season for color, a giant caution

light, cars slowing, waiting, heads

turning left—right—left, and still

someone grows daylilies, daffodils,  

and marigolds in the landscaped beds

by the nursing home windows,

jaundice, fear, and a canary

named Stan who sings and sings,

having learned the melodies

from a recording when he was younger, 

while someone creams butter and sugar,

adds yolks until the mixture becomes

something else and disappears,

like the old song, like the petals

that drop and the stems that carry on,

holding space. Bow ties, novelty

socks, the right shade of campfire,

the moment where flame leaps

and vanishes, the murmurs of goodnight,

goodnight, holding a cold hand

in a cold hospital room, stained

glass windows and old paper,

that handwriting, the words still good.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Callista Buchen is the author of Look Look Look (forthcoming, Black Lawrence Press) and the chapbooks The Bloody Planet (Black Lawrence Press, October 2015) and Double-Mouthed (winter 2016, dancing girl press). Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, and many other journals, and she is the winner of the Langston Hughes Award and DIAGRAM's essay contest.

America (as a Gigantic Female)

SWWIM Every Day
by Jennifer Martelli

by Jennifer Martelli

lay spread eagle on the sidewalk

bleeding out state after state: airless blue deep red.

 

(The men will come with chalk to trace her shape: white edges like hooks,

some like small penises, or a single mitten, and some crawl through the desert

and under a river.)

 

Three times the country screamed:

the first scream, an old car’s shrill brakes;

the second, a lovers’ spat, but the country knew the man who slapped her around, perhaps

          she asked for it;

third, could’ve been a dog in heat or in want.

 

And the lit windows were spaces between jack o’lantern teeth, backlit by a fat candle

nestled inside the scraped-out shell.

 

Honest to god, it could’ve been stopped. Rain-

 

storm after rainstorm barely washed the blood off this crime scene:

off the hot top, off the granite, off the pitch.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Martelli is the author of MyTarantella (Bordighera Press), as well as the chapbook, After Bird (Grey Book Press, winner of the open reading, 2016). Her work has appeared or will appear in Verse Daily, The Sonora Review, and Iron Horse Review (winner, Photo Finish contest). Jennifer Martelli is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. She is co-poetry editor for The Mom Egg Review.

For Once, Just Flowers

SWWIM Every Day
by Juliana Gray

bu Juliana Gray

Feeling sorry for myself,

I blew five bucks

 

on grocery store tulips,

pink as organ meats.

 

Outside, April sleeted down,

sealing the earth. A treat.

 

My good cleaver trimmed

the stems; an aspirin wafer dissolved

 

at the bottom of a blue vase.

If I’d stopped thinking,

 

I could’ve had what I wanted:

innocent prettiness.

 

But Google confirmed my pangs,

described the suffering

 

of cats who nibbled toxic leaves

or petals. Metaphor,

 

again. It always ends this way:

prowlers on the ground

 

and some verdant god enshrined

on a high shelf, unreachable.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Juliana Gray is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Honeymoon Palsy (Measure Press 2017). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, and other journals, and her humor writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.

Perspective

SWWIM Every Day
by Katherine Riegel

by Katherine Riegel

The back yard is drowning and I can’t tell

if that’s good or bad for nesting birds.

They still come for both suet and seed

but they always do, freeze and scorch and all

the in-between days too. I should be worried

 

about more than the birds, I picture

the worms fleeing in miniature arks

and spend some time considering how high

the water has to get before someone

decides it’s time to go. I keep wanting

 

to call my mother, ten years dead,

just to find out what she would make

of this mess. To get perspective. Have we

really fucked up this time, neck deep

in bloody water like it feels? Is clinging

 

to the beat and rise of feathered things,

their profligate beauty, more or less hopeless

than putting our faith in builders

of drains and ships and all those hungry

machines? If Earth is our mother I already know

 

how it is to be motherless: like the suit of armor

moving on its own, ridiculous

but frightening because nobody knows how.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Katherine Riegel's newest book, Love Songs from the End of the World, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing. She's also the author of two other poetry collections and a prose poem/flash cnf chapbook, Letters to Colin Firth. Her work has appeared in Brevity, The Gettysburg Review, The Offing, Orion, Poets.org, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is co-founder and poetry editor for Sweet: A Literary Confection. Her website is katherineriegel.com.

Boomerang

SWWIM Every Day
by Marissa Glover

by Marissa Glover

When we let go of anything, it’s always with the secret hope

that whatever we once held will one day come back to us.

 

This is a truth we don’t like to admit, even to ourselves.

We want to think we’re being generous or zen or wise,

 

when we move from the marital bed into the guest room.

But deep down we dream of a future return, some kind

 

of restoration; otherwise we’d never let go—

not of our small child’s hand, not of a lover who’s eager

 

to be someplace else, not of the happy dream that life could be better.

We treat our teaching job and our son’s school and a kiss goodbye

 

like waiting rooms, a temporary holding place for everything we love,

trusting that we will get it all back soon enough—healthy, whole.

 

But when the thing does not return, the truth we wouldn’t admit

is made clear. We let it go and wanted it to stay and it was always both,

 

at the same time. When the email notification says my points are expiring—

a CVS coupon, Old Navy Super Cash, BWW Blazin’ Rewards,

 

I want to rush out and buy something; it doesn’t matter what. I just can’t

bear to lose anything else. Not again. Not today. Not even 300 points.

 

Life is a series of repeated starts and stops; my time is measured

in the opening and closing of blinds, white wood slats on box windows

 

and the drawing of slate gray curtains across sliding glass doors.

Every morning opens, every evening closes—this day the same

 

as the day before. It’s hard not to wonder what’s the point.

My son’s hands are bigger than mine now—he holds his phone

 

a basketball, a pencil with no eraser. He doesn’t yet know

that his hands will never be big enough or strong enough.

 

I don’t have an answer when he asks why I let go of Daddy’s hand,

why I walked out. I think maybe I made a mistake because now

 

there’s no one here but me to close the curtains. No one but me

to ready the house for sleep. This life is not much different

 

from the life I kissed goodbye years ago, exhausted,

thinking it would someday return to me—healthy, whole.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Marissa Glover teaches writing at Saint Leo University and is currently co-editor for Orange Blossom Review. Marissa’s poem “Some Things Are Decided Before You Are Born” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Lascaux Review. Other poems have appeared in Stoneboat Literary Journal, After the Pause, Gyroscope Review, and War, Literature & the Arts, among other journals. Follow Marissa on Twitter @_MarissaGlover_.

A New Truth

SWWIM Every Day
by Madeleine Barnes

by Madeleine Barnes

*This is a visual poem. Please click on the title to view.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Madeleine Barnes is a writer and visual artist from Pittsburgh, PA. She serves as Poetry Editor at Cordella Magazine, a publication that showcases the work of women-identified and non-binary writers and artists. She is the recipient of a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship, two Academy of American Poets prizes, and the Princeton Poetry Prize. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU in 2016, and her second chapbook is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press in 2018.

To Answer Verlaine

SWWIM Every Day
by Allison Joseph

by Allison Joseph

"What mad Negro, or tone-deaf child
created this penny jewel, this crime,
that rings hollow, false under the file?"

                                    “Ars Poetica,” Paul Verlaine

This mad negro has skills 
you and all those pasty symbolists 
better recognize, music in my 

very walk, my laughter like Langston’s. 
I have my gaudy jewels: 
shiny dimestore pendants, 

cubic zirconia rings, 
my sold-on-late-night-television 
phony diamond earrings, 

and I make them look good— 
strutting without a stutter, 
striding in my own glistening skin. 

My only crime was to be born 
in this subtle and shaded hue, 
born to marvel at curious things 

until I had to write them down 
ringing with the very sound of verse, 
a kind of molten dignity 

even a mad negro could recognize, 
even on the edge of sanity— 
knife slice of all that enmity, 

all those ugly scratches history 
etched onto my eyeballs. 
Far from false, but still in your files— 

a literary suspect, accessible wreck, 
baby girl not fit for the Captain’s table. 
Riddle me this, Verlaine: 

how many poets does it take 
to stop a war, to broker a peace, 
to cut off a piece of any 

reader’s heart, swallow it whole, 
and live? I don’t know if you know 
how it truly feels to be mad, 

angered under the surface 
of myriad subtleties while another 
campus rages, and a city blisters with gunfire.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Allison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University. She serves as poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review. She is the author of 17 collections of poetry, most recently Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen Press, 2018), which won the Gold/First Place 2019 Feathered Quill Award in Poetry and is nominated for the 2019 NAACP Image Award in Poetry. She is the literary partner and wife of poet and editor Jon Tribble. 

Polka Dot Dress

SWWIM Every Day
by Angele Ellis

by Angele Ellis

Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), daughter of artists,

jumped from a Manhattan rooftop during a struggle

with depression. She gained posthumous fame

for her innovative photography of the body.

 

 

Your mother worked steadily

in the wake of your death,

peasant feet in painted slippers.

Shocked from function to form,

she blanketed a wall in Beijing

with pottery birds suspended in flight.

 

Your father abandoned abstraction,

clinging to the women he shuttered.

He clicked on a tattoo, kohl-rimmed zero.

The back of the model exposed

by her checkered schoolgirl uniform

stared at him, aperture of failure.

 

You—figure in the yellow wallpaper

blur of beautiful body and shadow

Eros with singed feathers and wild Psyche

Icarus with designer wings, fallen.

No ID but your polka dot dress and

your face, unrecognizable.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Angele Ellis is author of Under the Kaufmann’s Clock (Six Gallery), a hybrid prose-poetry tribute to her adopted city of Pittsburgh with photographs by Rebecca Clever; Spared (A Main Street Rag Editors’ Choice Chapbook); and Arab on Radar (Six Gallery), whose poems won her a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She is a contributing editor to Al Jadid Magazine.

The Chrysanthemums. Liège, 1968

SWWIM Every Day
by Ann Fisher-Wirth

by Ann Fisher-Wirth

First marriage, first party, first apartment.

I invited our boss the principal, and his wife,

 

both from the States, who I wished would

ask us over but who never did, so that

 

sometimes I cried after lunch in the bathroom

at school. On a concrete ledge beside the bed

 

in the one-room apartment, I placed

candles and a potted white chrysanthemum,

 

marked down at Delhaize, where I bought

haché de boeuf for my special meatloaf

 

and red-black wine in a plastic bottle.

At seven, when the guests arrived, I started

 

cooking the meatloaf and making apple pie.

In the pocket-sized kitchen, I finished the pie

 

and fixed the salad as my husband and guests

drank that wine, gazing despondently

 

out the window at the barges on the Meuse.

We ate at half past ten. The meatloaf

 

was a failure, the hardboiled eggs baked

in the meatloaf had turned rubbery and gray,

 

the wine could peel paint. My husband

struggled to keep up conversation.

 

The principal’s wife smirked, said, Oh my,

you don’t know about the chrysanthemums?

                        .           .           .

 

But why smirk at my flowers—even if,

as I learned, they were leftovers marked down

 

after All Souls’ Day, intended only to decorate

graves? My father died when I was fifteen,

 

when the spider chrysanthemums

in my parents’ back yard were blooming,

 

white feathery petals trailing in the mud

after the autumn rains. And since then it always

 

seemed to me that white chrysanthemums

blooming among rain-soaked shadows

 

were like the beautiful ghost

in the film of a Noh play that my father once

 

took me to see, the ghost that appears at twilight

by a temple, to the wanderer in a far country.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ann Fisher-Wirth’s sixth book of poems is The Bones of Winter Birds (Terrapin Books 2019). Ann collaborated with photographer Maude Schuyler Clay for Mississippi (Wings Press 2018), and coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology with Laura-Gray Street (Trinity UP 2013). Ann has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden, and residencies to Djerassi, The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and CAMAC/France. A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, and 2017 Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College, she teaches at the University of Mississippi.

Self-Portrait as Moon Clichés

SWWIM Every Day
by Anne Graue

by Anne Graue

Some say I am Artemis the Huntress

and I wax like a candle dipped over and over

 

and I wane until I disappear. I pull the oceans

toward me and then push them away. I am cold

 

and dark in shadow and almost transparent

by day. I bring scores of children and make wolves

 

howl at midnight. Full, I am wise. Quartered, I am

nearly empty. Halved, I am ambiguous. When I am

 

crescent, I am nearly new, ready to be filled.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Anne Graue is the author of Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press), and has published work in journals and anthologies including Westchester Review, Red Paint Hill Poetry Journal, the Plath Poetry Project, Random Sample Review, The Book of Donuts (Terrapin Books), Rivet Journal, and One Sentence Poems. Originally from Kansas, she lives in New York where she reviews poetry for the Saturday Poetry Series at Asitoughttobe.com and literary magazines and chapbooks for NewPages.com.

Aries on the Rise

SWWIM Every Day
by Nicole Zdeb

by Nicole Zdeb

Just escaped the cosmic dustbin,

March’s swirling floodwaters, and

you’re a master of beginnings,

the bright idea, strong coffee.

You hit your head more than once

against the deliberate consideration

of others. You like to fall in love.

You like to fall.

You build landings for the sky.

Subject to high fevers,

clairvoyance and weird dreams.

You want seven

women on seven seas

to bear your silvery seed.

You speak in puffs of smoke,

your mouth a popular sculpture.

A more desperate man would reach for his hat.

You look like you’re swallowing clouds.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Nicole Zdeb is a writer living in Portland, OR. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 2011, Bedouin Press published her chapbook, The Friction of Distance. Most recently, she has had work published in Rue, Magma, and Lily Poetry.

Cinderella's End

SWWIM Every Day
by Denise Duhamel

by Denise Duhamel

You died the day the first unripe squash sprouts 

curled from the garden. You’d grown weak, 

couldn’t make a fist to hold the lilies. They dropped 

to the floor, a bouquet of dream-teeth 

loosened from the gums. The morphine drip 

helped you forget your prince who had passed 

a few years before. The green 

hospital gown was a misnomer—how inelegant.  

How unready you were for your final social occasion, 

your tiny cracked feet in those floppy rubber slippers.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Scald (Pittsburgh, 2017). She and Julie Marie Wade co-authored TheUnrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. 



On the Night Tom Holland Lip-Synched Rihanna’s “Umbrella” While Zendaya, LL Cool J, and Chrissy Teigen Looked On

SWWIM Every Day
by Michele Battiste

by Michele Battiste

the earth shifted                uncomfortably

on its axis, its oceans        swelling in defiance

of the tides. The moon      hesitated in her

orbit, uncertain of the       trajectory.

Dusk loitered above the horizon, radiating

a heat previously               unknown to climate

scientists. Grasslands        paused their sway,

rigid in the                        disturbance.

 

Old men flooded               online markets, depleted

stocks of body                   paint and long strands

of rhinestones. Children   rose from early bedtimes

to stroke their parents’ backs and guide them gently

to their rooms. Deer          crept from the outskirts

of yards to huddle                beneath open

windows and they             could not be chased

 

away. Pale-winged            moths fluttered by the dozen

in the blue light                 of screens and they could

not be chased away. Ghosts who crossed—meek

and obedient—crossed back with reckless

speed and they could        not be chased away.

 

Gravity shrugged off        certain burdensome

laws. Sound waves           bent at undiscovered

angles. Matter                   sidestepped the customary

forms, and the vast            unknown forces

of the universe let go one long-held collective breath

knowing exactly               what will happen next.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michele Battiste’s latest book is Waiting for the Wreck to Burn, which received the 2018 Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press and will be published in Spring, 2019. She is also the author of Uprising and Ink for an Odd Cartography, both from Black Lawrence Press. She lives in Colorado where she raises money to save the planet. Visit her at www.michelebattiste.net.

Kitchen Meditation

SWWIM Every Day
by Lisa Zimmerman

by Lisa Zimmerman

The study in blue and white is the kitchen window

with its winter history, bottles on the sill holding

 

a steady cordial of January’s thin light—

clean, cold, undrinkable. Whereas summer

 

remains unthinkable, so future I could build a church

around it, be saved again by the virgin’s blue gown,

 

its cascade down to her naked feet, stained

glass windows a brilliant fracture of gold, black,

 

red for blood, and other passions.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Natural Bridge, Florida Review, Poet Lore, Cave Wall, and other journals and anthologies. Her first book won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Her most recent collections are The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). Her poems have been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. She’s a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado.

Family Portrait as the Golden Mummies of Bahareya

SWWIM Every Day
by Andy Young

by Andy Young

A couple faces one another

as if in conversation.

This is how they were found.

 

Now they lie in vitrines

like fish in facing tanks.

Could not speak if they

 

could speak. They were

dressed for their death passage,

not to be specimens in glass.

 

Her bare breasts shine

like doorknobs. Linen

wraps for the poor, gold

 

masks for the rich, eyes

so lifelike excavators

gasped when they brushed

 

the dust away. The revolution

left no money for excavation;

thousands of mummies

 

still lie in burrowed tunnels

under the houses and roads.

The dead do not ponder

 

revolutions, but they like

to sometimes be considered.

Small mourning statues

 

were found in the tombs,

meant to eternally weep

at their side. One man

 

is a merchant with a Horus crown.

Tolemic, someone says.

Our son points to another’s

 

thickly outlined eyes.

He is awake, he says,

but does not answer.

 

A stone girl, five years old,

too poor for a golden crown;

my daughter, also five,

 

asks if they’re the same

size—yes, almost exactly.

For a while, this is how

 

our children will think of death:

gilded bodies that keep their shape,

wide-eyed and adored.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Andy Young is the author of four chapbooks, including the just-published John Swenson Dynamicron (Dancing Girl Press), and a full-length poetry collection, All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014). She teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Southern Review, Waxwing, and Prairie Schooner, and has been recognized in contests by Black Warrior Review, the Auburn Witness Poetry Award, and Consequence Magazine’s Women Writing War.

Cargoes

SWWIM Every Day
by Luisa A. Igloria

by Luisa A. Igloria

In late afternoon sun, toddlers tilt

forward and back on yard swings

at the halfway home. The high

 

school girl who volunteers there

wants to know what mother,

what father would throw

 

a daughter out into the streets, say

Don’t come back or You are as good

as dead to me; and the middle-aged

 

woman washing up at the sink looks

through the window at the vanishing light,

startling at the sudden film on her cheeks.

 

What sifts through the packed soil

as years rush by? Swift as birds in the corn,

long green tassels in the summer evening;

 

lifted by wind, bearing redolence

of cow manure and honeysuckle.

Along the southbound road,

 

where the dip rises toward the knoll,

locals tell of a girl who rode behind

her brother on a motorcycle. Who

 

could have foreseen the truck in the other lane,

its side-view mirror glancing like a blade

along her jaw? The sky’s inverted basin

 

flooding her eyes with the surprise of indigo,

before the head’s brittle husk snapped back

and arms and fingers tightened in rigor

 

around the living body. That’s how we press

forward into deepening twilight, carry the shape

of our eternal cargo: the voice that breathes

 

in our ear saying love or goodbye—as we

crest the hill and gun to a stop, waiting for the lights

to flash and change from yellow to red to green.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Luisa A. Igloria's publications include What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Chapbook Poetry Prize), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, March 2018), and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press). She teaches on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University, which she directed from 2009-2015.

The Eye Is Collapsing

SWWIM Every Day
by LB Thompson

by LB Thompson

rain unpeels from wheels or treads

ominous pause before wind begins

 

tell me, how could love be any different

bodily love at some precipice

 

when the holding is stronger

than the flourish of release

 

            outside, the wind over and over shows

            the pale undersides of maple leaves

 

the release, not the holding means

but this is a palpable bonding that refuses to fuse

 

separation is a more conscious choice

first one, then the other loses interest

 

            venerable maple trunk squeezed by rain shined ivy vines

            downed limbs cracked, softened nearly to pulp

 

features praised now fade

the freckle on the stretched neck

 

that wanted kissing and was kissed

now assimilates in a night wash

 

            even the ivy lets go

            its whisker claws unclench the bark

 

even the nodes pinched

into life a moment ago

 

do not shine out

possible to see morning’s blurred blue

 

            the electricity does not thrum

            the clocks have nothing to say

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

LB Thompson's poetry has won national awards from The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the Rona Jaffe Foundation and has appeared in The New Yorker and other literary journals. Her collaborative work with artist Ellen Wiener has been exhibited in New York and at Vanderbilt University. LB teaches at Suffolk County Community College and The New School/Parsons in New York City. She lives with her wife and book collection in Greenport, NY. 

Post-checkup, I don’t watch the State of the Union

SWWIM Every Day
by Emily Rose Cole

by Emily Rose Cole

He will say strong. They always do. The ending’s spoiled.

Spoiled, too, as I learned today from my doctor, probably my spine.

Or, more technically, my thoracic spinal nerves. In one of them,

my doctor thinks, a lesion. Bright erasure. Corrosive smudge.

(Why do I always want these new eyelets in my brain to suggest

light?) Just a little one, she postulates, pre-MRI. A little one

that could turn python, swallow whole my feet. With MS, it’s impossible

to predict an ending—my checkup tests a catalogue of potential

losses: Balance. Reflexes. Vision. Memory. Strength. She holds down

my arms one by one. Push back, she says, and I do. For now. At home,

unfocused on my work or my country, I prime my abdomen

for injection. The drug burns its acidic promise, leaves its welting,

subcutaneous kiss. Stay strong, my dad incants through the phone.

I decline. On Capitol Hill, the President rises to a paroxysm of applause. 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Emily Rose Cole is the author of a chapbook, Love & a Loaded Gun, from Minerva Rising Press. She has received awards from Jabberwock Review, Philadelphia Stories, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2018, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is pursuing a PhD in Poetry and Disability Studies at the University of Cincinnati. You can reach her via her website at emilyrosecolepoetry.com.

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